Journalist Shot Dead in Front of Her Child

A journalist has been gunned down as she was leaving her home this week, in Mexico. The journalist, Miroslava Breach, who worked for Mexico’s national newspaper, La Jornada, reported routinely on corruption, organized crime and drug trafficking.

The death of 54-year-old Breach marks the third journalist death this March. According to Article 19, an independent human rights organisation, in the first half of 2015, 227 attacks against the press were recorded. It further discussed the human rights crisis facing Mexico for journalists, as the country ranks as one of the most dangerous in the world to work in the media.

According to Article 19, the majority of murder cases goes unchecked.

“The data on violence against the press in the first six months of 2015 categorically demonstrate[s] that freedom of the press is under constant attack in our country. ‘More violence, more silence’, the first bi-annual report of 2015 produced by ARTICLE 19 reveals the constant deterioration of our constitutional right to freedom of expression. We don’t want to focus on the numbers, per se, instead we wish to emphasise that each story should alarm us and preoccupy us,” Article 19’s director, Dario Ramirez said in 2015.

But since 2015, circumstances for journalists in Mexico hasn’t improved. Breach was shot dead in front of one of her three children, getting ready to go to school, in the northern state of Chihuahua. She was shot eight times and died enroute to hospital.

Reportedly, a cardboard message was left at the scene saying “for being a tattletale.”

In total, since 1992, a recorded 38 journalists have been killed in Mexico, and a further 50 “slain under circumstances that have yet to be clarified,” ABC News reports.

Carlos Lauria, the Americas director at the Committee to Protect Journalists said the three deaths this month are so far, not linked. However, he acknowledged the situation in Mexico is “dire.”

“It goes and comes in waves, but the reality is that especially for reporters working outside Mexico City, the levels of violence are unprecedented,” Lauria said.

Breach spent her final working days documenting murders, reports the LA Times:

“She reported on the six people killed in a single night in her home state of Chihuahua, and on the assassination of a well-known environment activist there. She wrote about the discovery of clandestine graves, about several police officers killed in an ambush, and about the bodies of three brothers that turned up, headless, in a rural mountain town.”

Although her child was unhurt during the incident, they now have to face a life without their mother, all in the name of reporting the truth and freedom of speech.

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